| Dawn, Prod#ST:ENT 139 | |
| Synopsis: | |
| Trip Tucker is alone on a test mission aboard Shuttlepod One when he is fired upon by a territorial alien and forced to land on the night side of a moon. |
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| MJC Review: | |
| The Drama - | |
| Once again, Trip crash lands on a strange world along with an alien. This time, he doesn't make out with
him or her or it. This episode turned out not to be as "cheap" as Precious Cargo. The theme of the story is not uncommon: stranded with a foe, establishing communication, trying to work together to save each other. It
certainly has repeated itself in many Trek stories as well as other literary
works. This episode does have a close resemblance to a
classic sci-fi movie. Does a certain movie staring Dennis Quaid and Louis Gossett Jr come to
mind? At least the alien wasn't pregnant. I guess it depends on how you tell
such a story which determines if your just begin a copy-cat or not. The first half of the show was quite boring. The viewer had know idea what
the story was about or where it was going. Lesson 101 for series writing: keep the viewer interested at all times. It was only towards the last few scenes that things became worth watching. Scenes and line actually began to flow and make sense. There were some good fight scenes,
between Trip and the alien. In the last fight scene, they just wore each other out. HA! It was good that the alien didn't happen to know instant
English or even learn it instantly. That would have made the whole
story just stupid. Trip had to make a lot of effort to establish communication with the alien. Most of the episode dealt with that very issue. Eventually, that lead to trust. How very "starfleet" of Trip to do that. Kirk would have just busted his foes balls, stole his women (if there
was one), and headed out towards the sunset. However, that was 1960's writing standards.
This episode was an average representation of previous similar
themes. No major foul-ups, but no great surprises either. |
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| Tid Bits - | |
| 1) Where was Mayweather? 2) Alien "water": looks like chocolate milk. 3) Showing Trip's hairy chest was yet another attempt at "sexing it up". It added nothing to the value of the story. The network execs should keep their target audience in mind. If they're going to do cheap stuff like that, next time show off T'Pol's bare chest. 4) Seeing that communication was dealt with mostly in this story, maybe Hoshi should have been the one to crash land. At least showing off her chest would have gotten better viewership, though still adding nothing to the story. |
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| What it all means - | |
| Communication | |
| 3 cool peace signs MJC 200301.12 |
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